Back up your blog.

I’ve spoken at a number of conferences, given technical advice online for years, and my number one tip is always BACK UP your blog.

It’s your content, you’ve put time and effort into it. You wouldn’t want it to just disappear. So keep a copy.

You all back up your blogs, right?

On blogger and wordpress.com you use export. It drops out a datafile of content, not layout/theme. It does not remove the original blog. So blogger instructions here and wordpress.com here. (I’ve a more detailed post on wordpress here)

On self hosted wordpress, you can still use export as above, but there are also a number of backup plugins that will do it automatically for you and to places like dropbox. Just search plugins for backup and go with something with lots of good reviews 🙂

I also use feedburner to provide an email subscription service (there are other options) and I subscribe to my own email, so recent posts are in my inbox.

Note: neither of the export methods described above give you local copies of media (pics). If they are important to you you’ll need to manually download from wordpress/ arrange copies on blogger.

Here ends the public service announcement.

(Off you go then, now!)

(What do you mean, why? Or that you’re relying on google to back up their servers? That means you are also relying on them not getting it wrong if someone issues a malicious or erroneous DMCA takedown against you. Yes, it happens. Seriously, for all of our peace of mind, just back up your blog.)

Oh, and another point. Do keep an eye on email addresses associated with your blog. You’ll be sent a warning of there’s a DMCA for example, and can counter claim or fight it if you get the notification in time. Similarly for domain name renewals, if you miss the reminder you can lose your domain.